We should note as well that in pre-Christian antiquity the word "atheism" is practically meaningless. Ancient trials for "unbelief" or "impiety" are generally concerned, in reality, with other offenses. When the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus remarks that "there are some people for whom the sky is empty of gods," he specifies that they do believe, nevertheless, in magic and in the stars. In Rome it was the Christians who were accused of "atheism," since they showed no respect to images of the gods or to places of worship. In Greece, rational thought itself only reoriented theogony and mythical cosmology. That is why Claude Tresmontant, after having gratuitously likened pantheism to "atheism," is compelled to write that the latter is "eminently religious," that in fact "it is far too religious, since it unduly divinizes the universe." In ancient Europe, the sacred was not conceived in opposition to the profane, but rather embraced the profane and gave it meaning. There was no need for a Church to mediate between man and God; the whole city itself effected this mediation, and religious institutions constituted only one aspect of it. The conceptual antonym of Latin religio would be the verb negligere. To be religious is to be responsible, not to neglect. To be responsible is to be free -- to possess the concrete means of exercising a practical liberty. To be free is also, at the same time, to be connected to others through a common spirituality.